“Singing Sculpture documents one of Gilbert & George’s most famous “living sculpture” pieces.
Covered in multicolored bronze paint, the artists sing and interchange parts of the English
music hall standard “Underneath the Arches.” Through their stylized performance,
Gilbert & George deliberately blur the lines between life and art, reality and contrivance.
This ambiguity does not rely on a transformation from living to sculptural form. On the contrary,
they have merged the two in order to obliterate, rather than emphasize, the distinctions between life and art.” - Walker Art Center
from Video Data Bank

on emerging mobile technologies

wi, the journal of the Mobile Digital Commons Network (MDCN), publishes the latest in Canadian mobilities research, encompassing disciplines such as design, engineering, computer science, communications and media studies.

Currently focusing on the research work of MDCN projects, wi aims to expand its purview in the coming months to include other national and international scholarship, artistic productions and design research on mobility, wireless technologies, and digital media. In this issue:

A recent project by Seattle artist Caleb Larsen harnesses RSS feeds to document the news media's cynical exploitation of readers' lust for tragedy. Titled after a newsroom cliche, 'Monument (If it Bleeds It Leads)' scans a Google News feed for the word 'killed' and accompanying statistics about the number of dead. The figure is sent to a toy that shoots brightly colored plastic pellets from the ceiling of a gallery space, dispensing a pellet for every death reported. Sometimes the pellets come one at a time, sometimes 1,500 are fired. As one waits for the next wave to fall, the anticipation associated with viewing kinetic sculpture becomes a metaphor for a fascination with bloody news stories. In the sculpture, actual tragedy is eclipsed by a desire for an aesthetic experience in the same way that tragedy vanishes behind the spectacle of a gristly headline. But far from simply moralizing about media cynicism and public bloodlust, as the pellets pile up, the project becomes a sobering memorial. Once it hits home that each yellow sphere represents an actual life lost, the project creates an occasion to reflect on deaths that had once become sensational abstractions streaming over the Web. - Bill Hanley

What role do videogames play in our lives today? As the boundaries between the virtual and the real blur more and more in the new gaming worlds we have come to inhabit, new conditions arise. Videogames encompass ideas, narratives, points of view and ideologies. They form images, they develop new aesthetics and offer new ways of understanding. Videogames express and reflect today’s world – they are a part of it. New identities appear, new roles are defined, new mentalities are being born. With the theme Gaming Realities Medi@terra 06 aims to explore the different dimensions and developments in the gaming fields and the impact they have on the different fields of society today. This year’s programme features the following activities and events

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Conference ‘Gaming Realities: the Challenge of Digital Culture’
A 3 day conference [6 – 8 October 06] with guest and participant speakers [game designers, artists, researchers, developers, journalists, writers, theorists] who are invited to adopt a stance and express their thoughts on the crucial issues and concerns about videogames today.

A recent project by Seattle artist Caleb Larsen harnesses RSS feeds to document the news media's cynical exploitation of readers' lust for tragedy. Titled after a newsroom cliche, 'Monument (If it Bleeds It Leads)' scans a Google News feed for the word 'killed' and accompanying statistics about the number of dead. The figure is sent to a toy that shoots brightly colored plastic pellets from the ceiling of a gallery space, dispensing a pellet for every death reported. Sometimes the pellets come one at a time, sometimes 1,500 are fired. As one waits for the next wave to fall, the anticipation associated with viewing kinetic sculpture becomes a metaphor for a fascination with bloody news stories. In the sculpture, actual tragedy is eclipsed by a desire for an aesthetic experience in the same way that tragedy vanishes behind the spectacle of a gristly headline. But far from simply moralizing about media cynicism and public bloodlust, as the pellets pile up, the project becomes a sobering memorial. Once it hits home that each yellow sphere represents an actual life lost, the project creates an occasion to reflect on deaths that had once become sensational abstractions streaming over the Web. - Bill Hanley

What did you code on your summer vacation? Is 'new website' sandwiched into your fall shopping list, right between fresh pencils and a slide ruler? Broadspire, Rhizome's host with the most, now offers you affordable web services and a chance to drop a dime in our donation box by mentioning 'Rhizome.org' on your registration form. You don't need a student discount to love their starter plan. For $65 per year, you'll get 350MB disk storage, 1GB data transfer a month, POP email, free setup, and daily content back-ups. They also offer larger plans for those at the head of the class. As a special thank-you for signing-up, Rhizome will write your name and URL on our board. Why be 'another brick in the wall' when you can have the homeroom, er... homepage host behind your favorite new media resource? So go ahead and get yourself online, already. It's easier than a pop quiz! - Rhizome.org

The fourth issue of the Toronto based digital arts quarterly is
dedicated to surveying contemporary conceptions of the body in light of
digital technology. This issue features work from: Andrea Polli, Andrew
Bucksbarg, Chris Twomey, Ellen Waterman, Jenny Mason, Skyapnea, Suguro
Goto, Susanna Hood, Testroom, and an interview with Stelarc conducted by
David McCallum.